Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The mouse trap, redux.

The historical provenance of the mouse trap's unique design back to 1847 reveals its inventor, Job Johnson, and that it is reducible to a functioning single part animal trap, the fish-hook.

Figure 1. A modern Victor Brand mouse trap with bait-pedal up, showing the vestigial profile of the fishhook, from which it originated.

In
his book Darwin’s Black Box1,
and follow-up The Edge of Evolution2,
Biochemist and Intelligent Design instigator Michael J. Behe uses the mouse
trap as the defining example of a device that is irreducibly complex. He
explains how it can not function without all of its parts, and that none of its
parts, alone or in various combinations, can do the function of the entire
trap. And he explains how the trap could not have been created by a small
succession of modifications to some simpler precursor that performed the same
function of mouse trapping. Niall Shanks,
in his critique of Intelligent Design3, made an effort to address
the historical origin of the mouse trap, but could not get past what seems like
a popular myth when in fact there is much older supporting evidence for the
origin of the mouse trap in both the Patent Office and in antique mouse trap
collections.

The
origin story for the mouse trap is important because it maps the progress of a
complex idea. It is at the first moment of invention of the mouse trap that marks
the start of the idea of its complexity. It is in the original trap that the human
intelligent design work was performed. The complex mouse traps designed
thereafter are a cascade of copycat follow-ups with incremental changes to the
original design. The idea of a snap-style mouse trap is an idea that, once it
started, became hugely popular.

If
you could collect one example of each mouse trap produced every year after its
original invention and place each trap on a long table side by side in
chronological order, how do you think these mouse traps would appear to have changed
over time? How far back in time would we have to go to find the original snap-style
mouse trap? Would the original snap-style mouse trap even look the same? The
long line of mouse traps we see before us would be a record of the legacy of
small improvements to the original snap-style mouse trap design.

While we have
no table of mouse traps handy, there is an
excellent record in the U.S. Patent office that documents, illustrates and
patents each important improvement in its evolution. For example, today some Victor
brand mouse traps4,5,6 are sold “Pre-Baited” with yellow plastic
bait parts shaped like little slices of Swiss cheese impregnated with a chemical
scent to attract mice, a high-tech improvement eliminating the need to supply
and load bait. But this chemical innovation is really just a small incremental
change to the previous stamped metal bait tray7. Everything else is
the same. If the plastic was soft enough to gnaw on and could be further
impregnated with a mouse-specific poison, perhaps the rest of the mechanical
parts of the mouse trap would become dispensable, converting it from a trap to
a poison. So minor innovations, like the new “Pre-Baited” trap, can accumulate
and obscure the details of the original mouse trap design.

Figure 2. Patent drawings of the pre-baited cheese-shaped bait pedal.

This is precisely
why we must go back in time and conduct some research to try to find the
original invention and an authentic artifact or illustration to comprehend its
design. The
original inventor of the mouse trap had no mouse trap to look at or think
about, just a problem to solve: how to trap and kill a wild animal busily
gnawing away at his food stores in the cold of winter. Would Behe’s questions
about irreducible complexity and the nature of the parts of the mouse trap hold
true for the original first mouse trap? Or would the original device betray
Behe with answers that would prove to be the undoing of the most fundamental
straw-man of the Intelligent Design argument?

The
snap-style mouse trap design is what Richard Dawkins8 calls a meme, which
he defines as an original thought or first of a kind idea that has been copied
and repeated many times since its origin. The mouse trap idea began with the
very first such trap, and it is at the time of origin of this idea where the
analysis of the irreducibly complex features must be properly considered, not the
countless copies that follow or their incremental changes to the original
design.

Let’s
look at the history of the mouse trap to understand this. Now, the modern mouse
trap is a very common item, simple enough to be understood mechanically, and
very easy to illustrate. Definitive statements can be made about today’s mouse
trap mechanism and its complexity. In his argument, Behe asks his readers to
imagine how well the modern version of a mouse trap would work missing one, two
or even more parts. But we know nothing of earlier designs, so this puts the
reader in the position of having to imagine a design history for the modern mouse
trap. For us to conclude that there could be no simpler form of the mouse trap,
based on the very sparse imaginary history we fabricate in our minds, is a
flawed way of thinking. Like the many versions of the Robin Hood story we have
seen, starring a broad range of stars, from an animated fox to Russell Crowe, there
can be a big difference between an imaginary history and a real history.

Since
old mouse trap designs are obscure, we must look up some of the mouse trap
patents and find old mouse traps in collections in order to follow them back to
their origin. There are thousands of illustrations of mouse traps filed with
the U.S. Patent Office and other patent offices worldwide. By looking back
through old patent documents, we can find many forms of mouse traps, some with
recognizable snap-style trap features, but also many others with springs in
strange places or iron parts where wood is expected. So it is better to
consider the information in the patent records and in actual artifacts as original
sources of information.

Who invented the mouse trap? A crowd
of inventors might say “I did!” each raising his hand. With over 4,400 U.S.
patents on mouse traps, many can claim to have invented a mouse trap. But who
was first? The mouse trap’s invention story is remarkably
convoluted and obscured by thousands of inventors all trying to “build a better
mouse trap”. More problematic is that the most successful American mouse trap
company, Woodstream, has perpetuated, in the popular media, a myth about the
invention of the mouse trap, attributing the modern mouse trap design mostly to
its founder, John Mast.

In fact there seems to be two separate
corporate mouse trap origin myths in publications, one American and the other
British. The good folk of Lititz PA would point to their long-running company, Woodstream,
makers of the famous Victor brand mouse trap, and credit company founder John
Mast with the invention in 1899 which was patented in 19039. Although
some popular articles10 correctly place the year of invention of the
Victor Brand mouse trap to 1894, that is not the date of the Mast patent. In an
interesting parallel, folks more familiar with the British “Little Nipper” mouse
trap would credit James H. Atkinson with the invention in 1897. His British patent
(GB 13277 of 1899) was sold in
1913 to a company named Proctor for 1000 British Pounds. Both Proctor and
Woodstream have been making mouse traps for a very long time, so it is no
surprise that each takes credit for the invention, though separated by vastly different
markets and an ocean.

Now, while Mast and Atkinson are the
inventor-founders of the two major mouse trap companies, the race to perfect
and market a cheap and reliable mouse trap was not new in the late 1890s, the
period in which they started their respective companies. Their own patent
documents show that they borrowed many design ideas from other trap inventors.
One earlier patented mouse trap design11 is more similar to Woodstream’s
modern Victor brand design than any other, even closer to it than Mast’s own 1903
patent. It was the 1894 design of William C. Hooker of Abingdon Illinois. Hooker founded
The Animal Trap Co. of Abingdon Illinois with his invention. According to mouse
trap collector and expert Rick Cicciarelli, The Animal Trap Co. first marketed
their unmistakably modern looking mouse trap as the “Out O’ Sight” mouse and
rat trap in two different sizes.

This is important because the design of the
snap-style mouse trap and the rat trap are both identical designs, just scaled
copies of the same design, one mouse-sized, and one-rat sized. Cicciarelli
tells us that the company that Mast had founded acquired Hooker’s design in 1905.
This explains why sometimes the Victor mouse trap is credited with being
invented in 189411, the date of the Hooker patent, which became
their intellectual property.

So it was Hooker’s design that became the
modern mouse trap, but even his design was also predated by earlier traps and
patents. And while Mast was indeed a master of turning the idea into a low-cost
product, the essence of the snap-trap was not his idea, nor even Hooker’s idea,
for that matter. The origin is found further back in time, back when trapping animals
for food was far more important than trapping pests like mice and rats.

To find the original mouse trap design
idea, let us try to define the essence of the mouse trap. How do we describe the
unmistakable part of the mouse trap that can be recognized by its structure as the
invention? The snap-style mouse trap is distinguished by a U-shaped bar that
travels 180 degrees from one side of a thin rectangular platform of wood, to
the other. It is powered by a coiled spring under torque, not by compression or
stretch. And it is triggered by the mouse moving a bait platform, releasing a
catch bar, and allowing the torque spring to move the U-shaped bar forward with
deadly force. A rat trap is just a bigger version of the mouse trap. So we must
also consider that the very first design could have been either in the form of
a mouse or a rat trap. So let us restate the “Who invented the mouse trap?”
question to reflect the details of its successful design idea; “Who invented
the snap-style mouse/rat trap with wooden base, bait trigger mechanism,
perpendicular torque-spring and U-shaped kill bar traveling over 180 degrees?”
Hooker’s patent satisfies this description. Are there older ones?

After examining snap-style mouse trap
patents, what varies most in the design, generally speaking, is the trigger
mechanism and bait tray. This is the part that holds the cheese that the mouse
or rat gnaws on that triggers the trap to snap shut. The bait tray has been changed
and refined over time by many inventors, including the modern fake plastic
chemical-scented Swiss cheese version. You can see the difference in triggers
on the Victor mouse traps for sale today4,7 as compared to Hooker’s
patent11. The modern bait tray and trigger is much more sensitive
than the original design and stamped from a single piece of metal. We can see a
number of small improvements in trigger sensitivity as Hooker’s design worked
only when pressed down. Hooker’s bait tray and trigger was made from three
separate pieces of metal but the improved single-part bait tray and trigger
senses chewing motion in any direction whereas earlier ones could be defeated
by clever mice who knew how to chew in the right direction. I imagine that sideways-gnawing
mice may have escaped with their lives and a cheek full of bait cheese, and
gone on to breed even more sideways-gnawing mice, were it not for these
numerous slight modifications to the bait pedal and trigger mechanism over time.

Now let us go back further, as several
patents predate Hooker’s 1894 patent. The C.B. Trumble Patent of 189212
and the W. H. Castle patent of 188813 are key examples of what
patent lawyers call “prior art”. These older designs retain the essence of the
snap trap design as I defined it above, but with variations that include
different triggers and cast iron bases instead of wooden bases, and double
torque springs instead of a single torque spring, in the case of the Castle
patent. John Mast referred to both of these earlier patents in the text of his
own 1903 Patent9. In addition, Mast referred to two patents from 1855
that were granted to Lucien B. Bradley for rat trap designs14,15 but
he avoids mention of the Hooker Patent11 in his filing, instead
drawing attention to the older designs, which helps our quest.

The 1855
Bradley rat trap patents14,15 were powered by springs that were compressed
and released and were oriented in a straight line to the bait, rather than in
the perpendicular torque spring arrangement. This may have been an effort to
alter an earlier torque spring design as a patent workaround. With the 1855
patents of Bradley, we are close to the origin point, and nearly half a century
before the date of the Mast patent which is so commonly mistaken for the
original.

Rick Cicciarelli
is an avid collector and authority on the history of antique mouse and rat
traps, and he has read through all the US patents in his quest as a
collector. Cicciarelli owned a prized snap-style rat trap marked “JOB JOHNSON
BROOKLYN NY PATENTED 1847”, which he bought at an antique store as a boy for
only $30. He believes it is the earliest flat snap-trap design. In his correspondence
to me, Rick says, “Generally speaking, that flat snap trap design is attributed
to Hooker. However, I have a flat snap rat trap which was patented in 1847, and
I believe THIS trap to be the earliest flat snap trap design.”

Figure 5. Rat trap, marked

“JOB JOHNSON

BROOKLYN NY

PATENTED
1847”.

Photo courtesy Rick Cicciarelli.

Upon
examination, the antique trap of Job Johnson does fully satisfy our question of
the essence of the mouse trap design idea, with wooden base, U-shaped kill bar,
and torque spring. But the patent of 1847 to Job Johnson16, assigned
the very early U.S. Pat. Number 5,256, was not the design of a rat trap. Rather,
it was one of the three first novel designs for a spring-loaded fish hook.
Johnson’s fish hooks are gloriously illustrated in photographs in a collector’s
book on spring-loaded fishing tackle and fish traps by William Blauser and
Timothy Mierzwa17. This text of patent number 5,256, being sworn and
witnessed statement to the U.S. government, tells us part of Job Johnson’s
story:

Be it known that I, JOB JOHNSON, of
the city of Brooklyn, State of New York, fish hook manufacturer, a native of
England, having been resident more than one year next preceding the date hereof
in the United States, and having duly declared my intention to become a citizen
thereof, have invented and made and applied to use certain new and useful
improvements in the constructive application, arrangement, and combination of
mechanical means whereby the bite of a fish at the bait on a hook causes a
crooked barb-dart to strike into and hold the nose, head or gills of the fish,
independently both of the line and of the person holding the line, and the
general arrangement of which, when of a proper size, may be applied to the capture of any kind of fish or of any
destructive or ferocious animal, and for which improvement I seek Letters
Patent of the United States;16

Job Johnson,
as it turns out, was a prodigious inventor. His legacy was nearly lost to
history but it has been recently rediscovered by Dr. Todd Larson, a historian
at XavierUniversity. Larson is an expert on Job
Johnson’s inventive legacy, which can be found in Larson’s book, The History of the Fish hook in America18.
According to Larson, Job Johnson was a prolific American inventor with 38 patents
ranging from fishing tackle to elevated railways, demonstrating his very broad
creative capabilities. Johnson got rich from a thriving automatic fish hook
manufacturing business. This success obviously put him in a position to explore
commercial designs for traps for other animals. His experience with springs and
wire, and his workshop, filled with springs and triggers from his work on the
spring-loaded fish hook, would have been the perfect place to experiment with
other forms of traps.

We know,
thanks to Dr. Larson’s research, that American farmers needed rat traps and
thought about using fish traps to catch rats, as is mentioned in an article in
the 1847 edition of The Prairie Farmer.
Entitled “A New Fish hook”19, the article described Job Johnson’s fish
hook and concluded, “Those who wish to catch rats have got the right machine
here.” So how did Johnson make the move from spring-loaded fish hooks to the
rat trap? According to Cicciarelli it is pretty obvious to the naked eye that
Job Johnson used his patented spring-loaded fish hook trigger design, stuffed the
spring-loaded fish hook mechanism in a hole in the wooden base, and rigged the
torque-spring with a vicious serrated U-shaped striking bar. In Cicciarelli’s
words:

You can't really see the mechanism of
the trap very well from the photo, but the bait hook is actually a long fish
hook, the end of which goes through the base and comes out at the rear to hook
into the jaw when the jaw is pulled back into the set position. It works just
like the spring hook.

So the Job
Johnson rat trap actually contained a copy of his spring-loaded fish hook as a bait
platform and trigger mechanism. As such, it was fully covered by the wording
and considerations in U.S. Patent 5,256 and so the rat trap was duly stamped
“PATENTED 1847”.

Johnson was
already a well-known fish hook maker, having started the first American effort
in their fabrication in 1843. While now banned as unsportsmanlike, spring-loaded
fish hooks were, in their day, an important way for working fishermen to
maximize their catches. Todd Larson devotes an entire chapter to Job Johnson’s
inventions and says that he was a man “whose hooks were so good they inspired
poetry.” Truly, Job Johnson’s fish hooks are mentioned repeatedly in the 400
line ballad “The Legend of the Great Tautog” written by an anonymous author and
published on 23 October in The Spirit of
the Times, in 1852. According to Dr. Larson, Job Johnson’s fish traps were
known to be capable of catching small game, including rats, simply by hanging
them above the ground by a string and baiting them.

Larson’s
careful research shows that his patent 5,256 for the spring-loaded fish hook
was, in fact, an improvement on the first spring-loaded fish hook invented by a
16 year old boy in 1845 named George Washington Griswold18. Griswold’s
design was assigned and patented by entrepreneur Englebrecht and lawyer Skiff
in 184617,19, and given U.S. Patent number 4,670. It was the first U.S. patent
involving a device to catch a fish17.

Griswold used
a flat spring to cause two hooks to close on the mouth of a nibbling fish. Job
Johnson improved the Griswold design with a more powerful contractile helical
spring, driving the two hooks together. Job Johnson was a natural at spring-making,
probably from his early training with iron wire fabrication for fish hooks. So
we know Johnson had the skills to design and assemble the parts of the first
rat trap. And we know that Johnson contemplated that other animals could be
trapped with his spring-loaded fish hook by the words in the patent text itself16.
Finally, we know that Cicciarelli’s prized artifact shows that Job Johnson fabricated
rat traps containing the exact same spring-loaded fish hook mechanism, with the
added torque spring and kill bar, and mounted on a flat piece of wood.

Well, this is
where we come to the end of the line of commercialized mouse and mouse traps, where
we run out of artifacts and patents. Older inventions may have existed, but
they were not spread as ideas. There was a wave of innovation in the mid 1840s
involving a proliferation of patents in fish traps, popularized by many
articles in the early editions of Scientific
American18 as one of the carriers of design ideas in its day.
The starting point of all this innovation was from the 16 year old Griswold’s
first spring-loaded fish trap.

As I
mentioned, collectors Blauser and Mierzwa have a wonderfully illustrated book
showing these early spring-loaded fish hook designs17. Their photographs
show that Johnson’s first design was a spring-loaded fish hook from 1846
fabricated with three metal parts, three rivets and one spring (page 16) but no
corresponding 1846 patent was found matching this artifact. Interestingly, his
1847 patented device was altered to be made with 4 metal parts, four rivets and
one spring (page 21). So Job Johnson likely took the Griswold design and made
at least two successive, slight modifications to create a superior
spring-loaded fish hook design that would continue to be sold into the 1900s.

There is little doubt that both Johnson and Griswold had other prototypes made in
between these that failed to work. While most of the failed prototypes of the
earliest fish traps and rat traps are lost and long forgotten, the additional
1846 fish trap of Job Johnson is evidence of a prototyping process prior to the
broad spread of the idea and more inventions in spring-loaded fish traps, mouse
and rat traps.

Thanks to Cicciarelli,
we can conclude that Job Johnson was the earliest known inventor and original
spreader of the snap-style rat and mouse trap idea. Yet it was a branch of an
idea started by the young Griswold, a simple idea about how to trap a fish, which
was modified into a snap-style rodent-killing machine. Like a viral predator, spring-loaded
fish traps crossed the species barrier to become rat trap and mouse traps,
providing two independent and successful lineages of traps, one trapping food,
and the other for getting rid of destructive pests.

So finally, now we can go
back to the context of Behe’s steps1 to determine irreducible
complexity and apply them to the Job Johnson rat trap. According to Behe, the
first step is to specify the function of the system and all the system
components. The second step is to ask if all the components are required for
the system function. Well, the system function of the rat trap is to lure in
unsuspecting rats and immobilize them so they can no longer render havoc on
stored food supplies. So the system function is unchanged; it is just adapted
for a larger rodent.

Now, we also
know that the spring-loaded fish hook used inside the Job Johnson rat trap was
itself a standalone animal trap, so we can state conclusively that not all the
components are required for the system function. Importantly, this is where the
answer changes from yes to no. Not all parts are required for the entire system
to function. And in fact we can dispose of all but a single part and still
retain system function. The simple one-part animal trap, the fish hook, is
clearly visible as the bait holder in the Job Johnson rat trap. So one part of
the Job Johnson rat trap is a physical precursor that remains largely unchanged
throughout its design: the fish hook.

Griswold
started off with a design that duplicated the fish hook into a grabbing mechanism
in a configuration like the gripping talons of a bird of prey. Johnson’s intermediate
work shows increased part counts in his first two spring-loaded fish hook
designs. He added one part and one rivet in a step-increasing complexity in a
small increment to provide better leverage for the trigger mechanism. It is
clear from the historical accounts that people used spring-loaded fish hooks by
themselves to catch small animals. So the piece of wood is dispensable, as is
the torque spring and kill bar. It is just as likely that one could catch and
kill a rat with a baited barbed fish hook as one could a fish, provided you
could stay awake long enough to wait for a rat to bite the hook in the middle
of the night.

So we have now
uncovered that the irreducibly complex mouse trap is a conclusion made by a convenient
omission of a forgotten history. The original invention is reducible to a functioning
single-part animal trap, the fish hook, retaining the same system function
throughout the transition. The historical lineage of the snap-style mouse trap
comprises evidence showing that the mouse
trap is an example ofreducible
complexity, thereby disproving the notion that it was irreducibly complex
when it was originally created. The mouse trap voyage through time takes us
back to the fish hook. And as I show in Figure 1, on the current Victor mouse trap7, the
profile of the metal bait pedestal is, remarkably, still shaped with the same
curve as a vestigial fish hook.

Job Johnson is
the most likely inventor of the mouse trap design. Why don’t we know more about
Johnson? Dr. Larson’s book tells us how Johnson’s last few inventions and
investments were considered the work of a crackpot, as he suffered from
senility in his 80s18. His inventive reputation suffered greatly as
these failures mounted. Johnson’s senility left a poor impression on the
historical record of his later years, and his earlier successes were overlooked
as things like spring-loaded fish hooks fell out of popularity for being
unsportsmanlike. And so the story of the invention of the mouse trap may be
obscured by Mr. Johnson’s own illnesses later in life. Yet his highly
successful 1847 fish hook design continued well after the patent expired, sold
by the Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues into the early 1900s. Only
two examples are known of the Job Johnson rat trap, and there are also very few
examples of the original Job Johnson spring-loaded fish hooks in the hands of
collectors. Oddly, the spring-loaded fish hook line of inventions starting with
Griswold was destined for extinction, while the early diverging line of rat and
mouse traps is still successful, and still being used today.

Recall that long
table and line of old mouse traps we were going to set up? Well we know it goes
back to 1847 and we know that next to the first Job Johnson rat trap we must
put the first three spring-loaded fish hook designs, two of Johnson’s, and the
first from Griswold. The mouse trap line is a branch from another long line of
inventions – the spring-loaded fish hooks. Men invented machines to trap pests
at the same time they were inventing machines to trap food. At the very
beginning of the two lines of traps lies a single-part animal trap called the fish
hook, the manufacture of which was Johnson’s trade, a set of skills passed from
father to son.

So let me more boldly ask whether any other device of complexity
is, historically speaking, going to withstand the kind of scrutiny we just gave
to the mouse trap design? Of course I will not suggest the mouse trap evolved
without human intelligence. After all, it is a product of human design. The key
point of the historical study is this: when you stop and identify individual intelligent
human designers as individuals and
you look carefully at how they design things, you see that they always apply
their intelligence in small doses of creativity in the context of prior
knowledge. Incremental additions to prior designs and prior knowledge are the
way humans achieve creative new designs. This is a principle recognized by the
Patent Office and the patent process. Small changes are how intelligent human beings
get to complexity. The true nature of human intelligent design is that humans
design complex systems in a step-wise approach, not in an all-at-once magical fashion.
Simple designs, such as the mouse trap bait pedestal/trigger part, are made up
from small improvements over time borrowing from earlier ideas. The Patent for
the silly Swiss cheese
shaped and scented bait pedal5, invented in 1981 and made ornamental
in 19896 , makes reference to an earlier cartoonish mouse trap with decorative
holes from a design patented in 194821. Again, simple ideas combine into
a minor modification4 to an existing mouse trap design7.

Inventions
accumulate new parts with variations on existing design memes just as evolving
creatures accumulate new genes based on variations of prior ones. The key is that
the knowledge is stored, either in memories, in writing or in the form of the
artifact itself. In living creatures the memory of the prior prototype is
simply the DNA, the gene which encodes the part. Each gene is an accumulated
store of information about the successful small innovations in the mechanical
parts, the proteins, within a cell. No intelligence is required in evolution
because the memory of prior prototypes does not require an intelligent being to
extract the information out and copy it and make small modifications to it.

Now, in the
case of human design, many other examples exist, and the patent
record holds many of the forgotten details. I invite you to scrutinize the
patent history of any object foisted as irreducibly complex. So far there are
no examples of spontaneous intelligent designs of inherent complexity that
withstand proper scrutiny, and if there are any that appear to, it is simply
because through the historical evidence of prototypes, trial and error has not
been preserved to tell the story. Even the modern design complexity research
community itself acknowledges that complex product design is a process of small
step-by-step improvements to prior designs22, and that this is the
preferred way our own most intelligent engineering teams pool their efforts to
approach complex design tasks.

My conclusion is that human intelligent design is itself a
process more similar to the evolutionary process than it is different. Only a
few design ideas are successful over the long term. Even successful ones, like
the spring-loaded fish hook, can become obsolete and disappear in a process
rather like extinction, while another related design, the mouse trap, thrives. One
of the benefits of having the Patent Office and its process is that these design
ideas are captured for all to examine and modify and reproduce. Patents are the
collective DNA of our human innovative genius and the genome of the industrial
and technological revolutions

18.Todd
E.A. Larson. The History of the Fish
hook in America:
An Illustrated Overview of the Origins, Development, and Manufacture of the
American Fish hook.Volume I 2007, Whitefish Press, DuluthMNUSA.

19.A New Fish
hook
in the 1847 edition of The Prarie Farmer, op
cit18.

9 comments:

Brilliant, I am delighted to see some progress in this kind of historical inquiry. I would myself have been unable to unearth the connection of flat snap mouse traps to fish hooks. I see your indeptedness to Rick Cicarelly and Todd Larson. Mine goes to David Drummond.

Nevertheless I wonder, where you would have mentioned ref. 23 in the text, if you did? Now, it is hanging in the reference list without being integrated in the text.

This is my publication, and I suggested a reticulate history of mouse traps. After all, flat snap traps were already used by the ancient Egyptians for trapping birds some 4000 years ago.

My blog also contains various tidbits on historical mouse traps and I will write a positive post about your article and new finding (about the fish hook ancestry) as soon as I find the time.

By the way, Leonard Mascall has published a book on fishing with fish hook and line in 1590 or so (its online at "Early English Books Online"). Taking a look at it for more ancient designs of fish hooks not to be found in the patent office might be worth it.

The connection I report here is most certainly thanks to Cicciarelli and Larson. The Job Johnson trap is a scarce and little-known artifact, and the owner Cicciarelli was very supportive with detail, pointing me towards Larson. At the time when he wrote his book, Todd Larson was unaware of this specific Job Johnson's rat trap, and his history of the fishhook did not steer him towards the mouse trap collector community.

Your excellent review of the deeper history of traps came to my attention about 10 minutes after I posted the article, and was submitting to COE (where i am a newb). I apologize for not integrating it into the text better, and yes it was a last minute addition.

The research and writing I did for this started in 2006 and the article was completed in late 2009. It was submitted to MIT Press in 2010 as part of a book proposal on examples of industrial machines that have well documented evolutionary paths and structures that look very much like protein structures. The book proposal was initially well received, but then languished so I set it aside.

The historical research I did left me with some strange new research ideas about ways to reconstruct the order of events in evolutionary history, which is part of what I have been pursuing in my lab over the last five years.

I started this blog in January with some of the book material I had that was in excess of the proposal. When the call for COE 53 came out I though I should just "get it out there". So I posted it, wrongly assuming the mousetrap history story had no further progress. When I spotted your blog and article, I added your reference. Your article is truly is a great summary and stands on its own merits.

There was a moment that my heart sank when I saw your article I though surely I had waited too long, and that you would have found the Job Johnson connection. But after a quick reading I realized you had not gotten to the 1845-1855 material, and that my conclusions were independent of your review on animal trap design and evolution.

I think you can see in your article's illustrations, several ancient trap designs that have hook-like bait holders, maybe hidden in plain sight.. One could argue the fish hook appears to be present in these designs from the pre-patent era.

However without Larson's excellent scholarship, one can only speculate that those curved metal bait holders were actually derived from fishhooks. Larson gives us the definitive written history tying the use of Job Johnson automatic fish hooks to attempts at land animal trapping.

The Blauser and Mierzwa book illustrates the complete tale of what I see as the cambrian explosion of spring-loaded fish hooks designs from the 1800s, which are now extinct. This color coffee-table collector's book offers some gruesome and tortuous examples of why these clever fish traps arrived at their unsportsmanlike reputation and ban. I know you will enjoy it. Cheers!

Like you, I embarked on inquiring into Behe's claim about mouse traps because nobody (including the opponents of ID) had checked the facts. Nobody had taken the effort to search for precursors and thus test the supposed impossibility of a precursor working with one part less.

My personal experience with editors and reviewers, however, was that they are less than un-enthusiastic about flogging that dead horse one more time. They seem to believe that no ID proponent will be convinced and no evolutionary biologist interested.

I had to de-emphasize this anti-ID theme and make it into a mere appetizer rewriting the bulk into a case study on material culture evolution. There are many scientific publications on material culture evolution and they create the niches and demands for many more. That is, you do not need to write this up as either an ID bashing or an analogy to protein structures, but there's a growing peer group genuinely interested in the evolution of material culture (artefacts).

Therefoore, I think you could do the same and get your evidence published, which is historically important and should not be buried with a first class funeral in a blog post.

Connect your findings to earlier studies on mouse trap history/ evolution, see whether you can find spandrels or the Hannah principle at work, and Niles Eldredge of Evolution Education and Outreach will probably welcome your contribution.

Apart from disproving ID, there are many other interesting questions to be addressed with your material, for example, the turning of a tension spring into a torsion spring.

Please, do try publishing it in a peer reviewed journal one more time.

I agree with Joachim that your work is important to publish, and that it will be more straightforward to do so if you de-emphasize the ID angle. Your main aim with these blog posts, to provide "examples of human design and how they inform us, by analogy, about the origin of complexity by evolution", is a good one, and would be an interesting angle for Evolution, Education and Outreach. I think you should have a go.

A fish trap patent of 1906 that I discovered just now prompted me to write yet another post on fish hooks and their shore leave. Hope you will not find it going against the grain fo your reading too much.

I did have a nagging doubt about the tension spring in Job Johnson's fish hook and the torsion spring in his rat trap from the very beginning. How are the two different mechanisms being construed as embodying the same patent?

Good question, but I don't think there is a mystery here. Springs have a restoring force that responds to an applied force to return it to an original set shape. A given spring can be pulled, pushed, or torqued, this is merely the direction of the applied force. Any spring maker will be aware of these properties.

As regards the patent enforcement recall that this all was very early US patent office history, only a little over 5000 patents were issued, and precedent law was just getting established.

Products were stamped "patented" or "patent pending" as a defensive move against copying. Access to the written patent records was not instantaneous as it is now. So the mere warning was sufficient to give the potential copier pause.

As for the mechanism, the baited fish hook that extends through the base might have been arguably sufficient for an 1850-1860's lawyer to defend in court armed with the Job Johnson automatic fishhook patent. But we will never know that, as we cannot duplicate the legal decision making that existed then.

What the historical record shows is that Job Johnson was a clever enough guy and master of the raw materials from the fishhook trade.

He was already an industrialist, founder of the American fish hook industry and made his own devices to produce fishhooks and needles.

So there is little doubt he was able to craft both these devices and make the transition from tension to torsion spring. Job Johnson's first patent 5,256 was granted in 1847 and his last 602,082 in 1898. He was a prolific inventor with a total of 38 patents in his lifetime.

What a great piece. I came across researching for a story on the Victor trap. I haven't been able to figure out how to properly navigate the USPTO site and am trying to see how many mouse trap patents have been issued. Perhaps you can give me some advice? What strikes me, and is the basis for my article, it that the simple wooden Victor trap is still made, and selling, after 100 years. I can't think of any objects that can claim such longevity.

Really a great piece of work. Didn't have such depth idea about the history of mouse trap. I'm going to use your such nice post as reference in my different research publish in Attic Pest Authority. Appreciate your effort and thanks for sharing such a nice post.